One of the things I like a lot about things like Star Trek is the idea of being inside of a ship, and controlling it from within it. Right now, Star Trek Online has a bridge view, though, as far as I know, you cannot control the ship from your bridge, you can only walk around the interior, oblivious of wherever your ship is or anything going on outside of it. And when you are actually playing the game, things seem to happen at such a fast and cheap pace. But Space Engine's way of travel is a lot more fluent, natural and feels more like the experience from the Star Trek shows. Even if its not something like an Enterprise bridge, having some kind of either static or interactive interior view of that kind of nature, I think would greatly enhance the personal experience of "commanding" a ship as if you are inside of it.

I once took Celesia's 1.6 ED, and manipulated the little cockpit overlay with my own image, of a large epic lounge with a tall spacious window view, and let the program travel randomly through the stars in this view. It had an immense effect on the feel of the experience, even if it was just a static image overlay... And then I think of space engine, and my imagination runs to if instead of floating through space myself, or behind a ship, that instead, I was sitting in a bridge room giving commands to go a certain direction, at "half impulse" or "warp 8", designated toward a certain system or cluster.

I'm sure something like that would take quite some times (maybe a year or two) to be implemented. I just wanted to write this to express how much I think about this kind of feature in Space Engine.

SpaceEngine's ships will not have any windows or cockpit. Pilot would connect to it via neurointerface, images from external cameras would be translated directly into the brain. So player would see space like now in SE, and can observe his ship from outside (3rd person view) - it will be computer generated image.

Implementing ships interiors is in plans, but them will have no windows (except some observation rooms). Windows are reduction of structural strength and pass radiation inside the ship. Instead of them, holographic displays would be placed on walls, creating the illusion of windows. Holographic display may show not-rotated image to pilot and passengers who lives in the rotating hab module.

I think it should depends on the ships. Neurointerface is a very futuristic technology, so it should be added to futuristic ships. But I don't think all the ships in SE will be futuristic. For instance, there's already DoctorOfSpace's shuttles, and they can already be controlled from inside, by placing on the cockpit and taking control.

So I think the only addition should be an option to place automatically the camera into the cockpit (for ships who have one, because for neurocontrollated ships, the option should point an outside camera of the ship for instance) while controlling it, and it will just require the adding of a special point on the ship info.

These are not ships which will be part of the SE game or default SE release, these are just addon ships, and as with any program of this type addon developers are responsible for their own ship interiors, which must conform to the limitations of the engine.

Quote (Voekoevaka)

So I think the only addition should be an option to place automatically the camera into the cockpit

I do agree that the default camera position should be in the interior of the ship, looking at a viewscreen ("window"), with an option to switch to 3rd person.

Quote (Voekoevaka)

Neurointerface is a very futuristic technology,

Not too futuristic; it should be developed significantly within this century. Already a lot of progress has been made, and people can already perform simple tasks with machines using only their brains through a brain-computer interface.

After spending a couple of days screwing around with the excellent ship builder, I think I have an idea for a compromise that could hopefully satisfy everyone.

How about adding a little "observation pod" module that can be mounted on a ship much like communication dishes or shunt engines are? It wouldn't be a "bridge", as in a place the ship is controlled from, it would be solely designed to allow crew members to view the epic scenery around them. It wouldn't have to be *practical* in any way, it's a luxury item. It wouldn't be used when the ship's doing anything that might be hazardous to its occupants. Maybe it has blast shields that close over it when not in use, or maybe it's an expendable structure so nobody really cares if it pops or gets flooded with gamma rays or whatever. At it's simplest it could be just a transparent bubble, or it could have a fancy lounge with nice chairs and a robot bartender or whatever.

As an added benefit these pods could be positioned on the ship's structure in such a way that you could get a nice view of the ship itself. You could mount multiple modules and pick different ones to look out of to get different views.

It looks like a perfect place to put an observation pod would be over the airlock you exit from at the end of that demo video, it would be accessible in all phases of flight and give a much bigger unobstructed vista than the narrow windows in the rings themselves do.

Perhaps it's not normally the best source of inspiration for a hard science fiction spacecraft, but this observation pod thingy I'm thinking of is inspired by a component of the Red Dwarf. The thin stalk it's mounted on is perhaps impractical, but I really like the notion of being able to sit in something like this sipping a martini while watching the universe move around me. The platform could rotate inside the dome to suit whatever acceleration state the ship was in.